Skelril

Skelril is a gaming community, and Minecraft server I started with some friends in February of 2012.

The server was initially ran off of my friend Rick Knowlton’s laptop, before being transfered to what was at the time my desktop computer. We later with the assistance of our friend Andrew Clegg, managed to get the server hosted by BeastNode, where it currently resides.

When it was created, I knew virtually nothing about programming. After a few months, we were dissatisfied with the plugins which we could get from – at the time – the Bukkit forums. At this point I began learning Java so that I could create our own custom content. This expanded into a proprietary mod known as Aurora – which was later open sourced under AGPL. Aurora grew to be an impressive mod, featuring a plethora of features.

Things were going well, until the Bukkit project encountered some legal issues. Once these legal troubles were compounded with the fact that Microsoft had just purchased Mojang, I decided to quit. The server remained in a idle state for some time, before eventually being shut off. I have since returned to the modding community, and started working on a new mod licensed under MPL which contains the desired features of Aurora. The new mod is known as Skree, and is a mix of our server name Skelril, and the word free.

There have been a number of set backs in porting Aurora to form Skree, as the new API, Sponge is itself an infant, and thus has various teething problems. Additionally, various other external dependencies Aurora used, have not been ported to Sponge, causing further delays, as I must either port them, or wait on others to complete the process.